The latest news in the world of customer experience and customer loyalty.
Golden Knights Could Deliver Golden Reward for Wynn Loyalty Members
There are many benefits to being a member of a loyalty program, but members of Wynn Las Vegas’ loyalty program may have just found one that could be very rewarding. This year marked the introduction of Las Vegas’ first professional sports franchise, the Golden Knights of the National Hockey League. Expansion teams such as the Golden Knights are made up of castoff players from other teams and are typically easy wins for more established teams. Except this year. The Golden Knights won 51 of their 82 games and easily made the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The city has gone crazy over the team’s success, and the executive director of Wynn’s race and sportsbook operations decided to join the hysteria. How? According to an article in The New York Times, he handed out thousands of free futures bets tickets to loyalty members that they can collect on if the Golden Knights win the Stanley Cup. The odds are locked in at 4:1, but the value of the bets range from $5 to $250 a ticket. The odds of the Golden Knights winning it all are still long, but not nearly as long as the 500:1 odds they were given at the start of the season. Still, they swept their first-round playoff opponent and are into the second round. Their success has odds makers throughout Vegas starting to sweat—and members of the Wynn loyalty program cheering twice as loud.
Online Shopping Returns Adding New Element to Retail Rent Mix
The death of the bricks-and-mortar retail stores has been greatly exaggerated. Well, maybe. What we do know for sure, though, is that online shopping has had a major impact on the stores, and an article on Bloomberg.com this week revealed yet another way the Internet is leaving a mark. David Simon, CEO of Simon Properties, the nation’s largest mall owner, said retailers are underreporting their sales numbers by deducting the cost of returns for items bought online. The rate of return for online purchases is four times that of in-store purchases. This matters for two reasons. One, it impacts the sales per square foot metric, which investors use to gauge the financial health of the property owners. And, two, it also impacts how much rent landlords collect from the retailers. Rents are often negotiated using a base amount and a percentage of sales that exceed a negotiated threshold. Some retailers even pay no base rent and just a share of the monthly sales. The deduction of online returns is a new element to the retail rent mix, and one that hasn’t been figured out yet.
J.D. Power, Qualtrics Form Alliance to Merge Customer Experience Management, Data Analytics
You can now have your data analytics and customer experience management all at the same time. J.D. Power and Qualtrics announced this week they were forming an alliance to provide strategic customer experience solutions for “brands in nearly every industry.” J.D. Power brings expertise in the syndicated benchmarks, advisory services and customer experience optimization to the table, while Qualtrics adds its Experience Management Platform that allows for the management of customer, employee, product and brand experiences on a single platform.